[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello Sachin,

Thank you for your input!

Although we are not quite convinced by your arguments, it’s always good to hear different views about the issue. Although I don’t think we’ll “go back” to the old model completely, what we may do by popular demand ;-) is to make it optional to stay signed in. To be honest – I don’t see the point, but we’ve done other things that don’t really improve security to ease user adoption. As long as it doesn’t significantly hurt it, we’re fine with it.

Leaving that issue for now, I wonder if you could elaborate a little on your thinking when you say “AxCrypt’s new model has essentially only made it useful for local device security“. Here I don’t follow at all – AxCrypt is at it’s best for encrypting data that is shared via cloud services or email etc. How does your reasoning go here?

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello John,

When you get the computer back, please contact us. We need to figure out what the ‘offline’ problem is.

Yes, you can select entire folders (but not recursively). Just right-click a folder in Windows Explorer and select ‘AxCrypt | Encrypt’. (With Premium, but that’s the problem of course, you can also designate folders as secured, which will facilitate to keep all files there encrypted).

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello John,

The ‘offline’ indication is displayed when we cannot access our server from the application. Are you perhaps behind a firewall which requires separate authentication?

The Premium purchase suffers from the same problem – the app can’t see that you’ve purchased Premium if it can’t access our server.

The issue here is definitely in server access.

Finally, you can encrypt and decrypt entirely offline. Just be sure, as always, to remember the password used.

Svante

PS – We’ll of course refund your Premium purchase if you don’t want it after this is resolved. Also, you’ll still get your premium trial, so it’s not gone just because you purchased.

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello John,

First things first – you’re offline. You can’t start a Premium Subscription offline since server access is needed to verify the offer. Just go online and it should appear. We should of course make that more clear. I thought it would clutter up the interface showing an option that can’t be used, but we’ll change it to pop a warning/information dialog instead.

You’ve had the misfortune to come to AxCrypt from an unusal angle. 99% of the users download the app and do it all from there – the signup, verification etc. It’s much clearer then.

The idea of starting automatically with Premium, is, well… We thought so too. It was like that up until a few days ago, but we’ve received so much user input about it, suprisingly enough, that we decided to try this model instead. Many users got confused and annoyed with the automatic Premium start.

Pricing is indeed tough. You could well be right, and your basic reasoning is of course sound. However, we actually do have some real costs/new users – in support. But apart from that, yes, the marginal cost of a new user is low. However, our plan is to put more features into the product at the same price, most notably starting with mobile apps. Also, we’re lower priced than just about all competition.

But, we’ll see, maybe we’ll get to 99 cents/month. Pesonally I’d love to – I’d much rather have many users at a low price many can afford, than a high price with fewer users where some just can’t afford it.

Thanks for the input, keep it coming if you will!

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello Robert!

Thank you for the idea. The thing is that if you work from Windows Explorer, it’ll launch itself anyway automatically.

I do try to keep the number of ‘options’ down, and if we do it by default it’ll certainly annoy more users than will like it.

Let us think about that one for a while, you have a good workaround anyway right now it seems.

Once again, thanks for sharing your experiences with AxCrypt.

Regards,

Svante

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello John,

Thank you for the input. Things seem so clear when we design them, but there’s always room for improvement.

All ‘Premium’ links should perhaps go to the ‘Try Premium’ function. It’s hard, we dont’ want to have too many text boxes and decisions like ‘Do you really want to Try Premium now?’ etc. So we have just one link for the trial.

Do you see this?

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello jpn5imp1!

Before making that final decision, please read http://www.axcrypt.net/blog/leaving-computer-axcrypt/ and consider. It’s not a random decision, we put a lot of thought behind this.

Best regards,

Svante

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello John,

While I won’t argue that the standard is moving towards SSL-everywhere, please understad that SSL (HTTPS) serves two purposes, but not always at the same time and this is not always apparent to a user.

The first purpose, which is always fulfilled is confidentiality. However, not all things are confidential. We don’t believe that our public web site, http://www.axcrypt.net, has anything confidential.

The other purpose, is authentication of the URL and organization behind it. I.e. that if you type ‘www.axcrypt.net’ you’re really talking to our servers and we represent a real legal entity, and not someone elses. This purpose used to depend on a list of trusted providers of root certificates, such as VeriSign, issuing them after a manual verification process. These cost money. Real money. And we’re still a rather small organization.

Recently, free certificates have been massively available via the Let’s Encrypt inititative. The problem is that these certificates really only fulfill the first purpose – encryption of the link. And, as mentioned, there’s nothing secret going on there.

If you’ll note, the account web site, https://account.axcrypt.net/ – where you sign in, *is* encrypted with a ‘real’ SSL certificate, where our corporate identity has been validated by the issuer. We’ve also ensured that we’re only using up-to-date algorithmns and key lenghts on that server.

So, yes, we’ll arrange for SSL for http://www.axcrypt.net/ as well, but since the *real* benefits are minimial to negligable and there’s a real cost associated with it it’s not been our top priority.

Thanks for the feedback!

Svante

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello John!

This is correct, we’ve changed the way the Premium Trial is activated. It used to be activated automatically, but now you can chose when you want this to happen.

Over 99% of our users use the AxCrypt 2.1 windows app, and that’s where this process is implemented. We’ll be making a “Try Premium” button available on the web as well.

Right now, please download the AxCrypt app, and activate Premium Trial there.

Best regards,

Svante

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello Brett,

The error message in question indicates that the file is severly damaged, beyond repair. You should try to locate an older version or a backup of the file.

This can happen in circumstances like you describe, where the system is shutdown or crashes, or media is removed, during an encryption operation. This is not unique to AxCrypt, it can happen to any software when it is writing data to disk.

AxCrypt version 2 has some more safeguards against this kind of situation. It does not happen often, but it does happen every now and then. Most often due to USB drives being removed to quickly without using the “Safe Remove” feature of Windows.

Best regards,

Svante

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello Jason!

Thanks for taking time to let us know what you think.

However, we really, really do believe that it’s a step forward!

Give it a little time…

First of all – you say “The screenshot login shown on Svante’s post above is in addition to an individual encrypted file password“. This is not how it works – it’s only the first time until you’ve upgraded the old 1.x files which were encrypted with a different password than the one you made for your AxCrypt ID sign in. The upgrade is automatic for files you open, and you can also do batch conversion from the menu.

So, once the files are upgraded, and for all new files, it’s just the sign in password.

You also write “having to sign-in first time you use program in any session” and “doesn’t seem to ask for password on any subsequent encrypted document“. Well, you can’t have it both ways!

What we do, is just like AxCrypt 1. When you click on a file, we ask for the password – we just call it Sign In.

As for the fact that you don’t have to re-type the password all the time, that’s really something we’ve thought a lot about. Please do read the following http://www.axcrypt.net/blog/leaving-computer-axcrypt/ which discusses this feature and the rationale.

Also, please note, that this has always been an option for AxCrypt 1, to remember passwords, we just made it standard with AxCrypt 2 – partly because of confusion caused by the optional nature of the feature in AxCrypt 1.

Once again – thanks for letting us know. All input affects how we develop the software, and insipires us to work hard on clarifying matters such as these so that it’s clearer from the start how and why.

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello Natash!

Of course you can access both AES-128 and AES-256 encrypted files with the Free version! We’ll never lock you out of your data because you’re not subscribing to Premium.

What will happen is that if you edit or create new encrypted files, they will use AES-128 instead of AES-256. But you can always open either level of encryption.

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Backups are always the right thing, regardless of encryption or not.

It sounds very unlikely that the Windows restart had anything to do with it, as described by you.

In the private email I sent you I asked about the exact sequence of events, and also what interaction if any you’ve had with AxCrypt 1.7 or earlier with this particular file.

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello!

Can you send a screen shot showing Windows Explorer and all the normal columns for the file (modified, type, size) in “Details” view pleaase?

If you do not want to publish the name of the file or a screen shot here, either edit it or send an email to svante dott seleborg att axcrypt dott net .

Svante

[AxCrypt SupportModerator]

Hello Fran and Barkeley,

You have it right. The solution for USB sticks indeed to use the standalone version of AxCrypt instead of the ‘encrypt to exe’ feature of the old version.

You’re also right that we’re not quite there yet – the standalone version needs to work really standalone without ever requiring internet access or our servers. This is now a high priority improvement, so we’ll work and implement this relatively soon.

As for what password to use it’s a little complicated due to the sharing features, but the easy way to explain it is that what will always work is the password used the most recent time the file was encrypted. This will always work.

[Author]

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